Here are some handy smartphone apps to help make your everyday life — and not just Earth Day — a little bit greener.

Four Seasons: This is an Earth Day-themed children’s book that features environmentally friendly interactions on every page. Those actions include helping trees grow, cleaning up litter or picking fruit off a tree. It moves through the seasons, giving a rudimentary explanation of the cycle of life. It really isn’t the slickest app, and the free version does have some annoying ads that can be removed for 99 cents. Like many of these book apps, it can be read to you, or you can record yourself reading the story. This is a short, simple story that will help illustrate the day for a young one, which makes sense, because the future generation is going to have to make up for our environmental negligence.

The Good Guide: This is a very consumer-focused app that gives ratings on more than 200,000 products, based on three measures: health, environment and society. Health covers ingredients, health impacts and certifications; environment includes resource use, environmental impact and transparency; and society measures the company’s social policies and how they resonate with consumers, workers and the overall community. A final score tallies all three out of 10. The search function on the app works by name, bar-code scanning or by category. As an example, looking under the Babies and Kids category, Aveeno Daily Moisture Baby Lotion has a composite score of 7.6 (Health 10, Environment 6.6 and Society 6.2). Under Food, Tropicana Premium Pure Orange Juice rates a 7.0 (Health 8.3, Environment 6.6 and Society 6.2). This is a comprehensive, well-made app that can make anyone a more informed shopper, and it has obvious utility way beyond Earth Day.

Joulebug: Gamification was one of the hottest trends in programming last year, and this app takes some of those principles, using game elements to help promote sustainability. You can sign up with Facebook — and it would like you to — or skip it. The point of the app is to compare and hopefully compete for the ways you live a better life. The app has suggestions that awards points and pins for doing environmentally conscious tasks. For instance, one of the pins is called “Flip Off,” which exhorts you to turn off the lights when you leave a room. Once selected you get a pin for it, and “buzz” it to your friends on social networks like Facebook or Twitter. That earned me 26 points. One of the more useful aspects is that it shows the yearly impact of an action, in terms of money saved or carbon emissions. In some ways, it is all a bit silly, but there are good suggestions to save energy and the impact numbers can be eye-opening. But as a game, it doesn’t feel particularly fun.